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A quarterly interdisciplinary journal sponsored by the Mid-America American Studies Association, the University of Kansas College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Department of American Studies, and KU Libraries

We hope 2014 was as good for you as it was for us! Last year we published four stimulating issues, including the return of our popular Summer Reading Issue. Our most recent issue of American Studies, Volume 53, Number 4, 2014, was a rich collection of articles by seasoned and emerging scholars providing a range of analyses of American culture. Our lead article was Timothy Aubry’s (Baruch College- the City University New York, English) “Humanities, Inc.,” which deftly explores the Institute of Humanistic Studies, a rigorous humanities-focused educational program for AT&T’s management in the 1950s.
As 2015 kicks off, we are busy wrapping up production on our first issue of the year, Volume 54, Number 1. We look forward to presenting five insightful pieces, including our lead article by Michan Connor, “Uniting Citizens,” critiques “deeper issues of power in contemporary political culture by considering the differences between businesses and cities as categories of corporations.”

AMSJ staff is currently preparing for another summer reading issue that will feature a number of essays reviewing texts that will speak to the fiftieth anniversary of landmark historical events that occurred in the year 1965, such as the assassination of Malcolm X, the closing of the Second Vatican Council, and the implementation of Great Society programs.

AMSJ staff also has special issue in the works that will explore Ellison’s contributions to the production, conservation, and interpretation of African American culture—“that fragment,” as he put it, “of the huge diverse American experience which I know best.” The issue examines historical contexts, debates in which he was involved and to which his thinking still applies, and an array of topics, such as visual arts, public policy, civil rights, philosophy, record collecting, and boxing.Guest co-editors: Tracy Floreani, Department of English, Oklahoma City University; Matthew Calihman, Department of English, Missouri State University; A. Yemisi Jimoh, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Just a few books for review…Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects, by Stephanie Li (Oxford, 2014)Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness, by W. Paul Reeve (Oxford, 2015)Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South, by Timothy J. Williams (North Carolina, 2015)Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism, by Karen Paget (Yale, 2015)The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination, by Robeson Taj Frazier (Duke, 2015)Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, by Rebecca M. Herzig (NYU, 2015)A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, by Mireille Miller-Young (Duke, 2014)Lone Star Muslims: Transnational Lives and the South Asian Experience in Texas, by Ahmed Afzal (New York, 2015)We Are Left Without a Father Here: Masculinity, Domesticity, and Migration in Postwar Puerto Rico, by Eileen J. Suarez Findlay (Duke, 2014)Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks, by Katharine Capshaw (Minnesota, 2014)

If you’re interested in reviewing any of the following titles, or in learning more about our submission guidelines please contact Managing Editor Hannah Bailey at amerstud@ku.edu.